This week on the Well-Seasoned Librarian Podcast February 21-25. Coconuts, Eastern Europe and James Beard.
Welcome to the newsletter for the Well-Seasoned Librarian Podcast. This week we have a great lineup of authors who I really enjoyed getting a chance to talk to. We have a great mix of guests who run from Cooking History, Botany, European History, and a biography of cooking legend James Beard.
Below is a list of this week’s guests.
Constance L. Kirker and Mary Newman (Coconut/Edible Flowers) The Well-Seasoned Librarian podcast Season Five Episode 17
Constance Kirker is a retired Assistant Professor in the Department of Integrative Arts at Penn State University Brandywine, with a continuing research focus on art history, international arts education and culinary history. She teaches art history, Western, as well as East Asian, South Asian and African from a comparative perspective. Regularly presenting research at international conferences, Kirker has most recently presented papers in Rome, London, Croatia, and Cambodia.
Co-author, Dr. Mary Newman A toxicologist by profession, transitioned into a food researcher and recipe tester while researching how to become a serious foodie herself. A transformation from eating habits limited to Kraft Macaroni and Cheese and Campbell’s Soup was urgently required for her very survival while a visiting Fulbright Scholar in Thailand.
Edible Flowers: A Global History was published by Reaktion Books in 2016 and Cherry in Reaktion’s Botanical series was published in June 2021. Coconut: A Global History will be published in spring 2022. Kirker and Newman are currently working on a book on the cultural history of the mango. (Author Website)
This episode is scheduled to air on Monday 02/21/22
Christopher Shaffer (Moon over Sasova: One American’s Experience Teaching in Post-Cold War Slovakia) The Well-Seasoned Librarian Season 5 Episode 17
Christopher Shaffer is Dean of Library Services at Troy University. A former history teacher, he taught in Slovakia in the first months after it became an independent nation in 1993, and also returned there for another teaching stint in 1996. Lessons learned in Slovakia, as well as from travels throughout Eastern Europe influenced his work both as a teacher and a librarian. Shaffer currently resides in Enterprise, Alabama, with his wife Amber and their two dogs—“the Girls”—Dolly and Molly. (Author Website)
This episode is scheduled to air on Wednesday 02/23/22
John Birdsall (The Man who Ate Too Much) The Well-Seasoned Librarian Podcast Season 5 Episode 19
John Birdsall grew up near San Francisco and learned to cook at Greens Restaurant in that city. He spent the next seventeen years in professional kitchens there and in Chicago, and did some writing as a side gig, including food stories and restaurant reviews for the San Francisco Sentinel, a pioneering LGBTQ weekly. After leaving the kitchen, he was a restaurant critic and features writer at the Contra Costa Times and East Bay Express, and the editor of SF Weekly’s food blog. In 2014, John won a James Beard Award for food and culture writing for “America, Your Food Is So Gay” in Lucky Peach, and another in 2016 for “Straight-Up Passing” in the queer food journal Jarry. He’s co-author of the book Hawker Fare (with James Syhabout), published under the Anthony Bourdain imprint for Ecco–HarperCollins in 2018. The New Yorker’s Helen Rosner called John’s first solo book, The Man Who Ate Too Much: The Life of James Beard (Norton, 2020), “elegant and unvarnished,…beautifully unconventional.” The book was a finalist for a 2021 Lambda Literary Award, a finalist for the Publishing Triangle’s Randy Shilts Award for Gay Nonfiction, and an Amazon Top 100 Best Book of the Year. John has written for Food & Wine, Bon Appétit, the San Francisco Chronicle, and Los Angeles Times, and taught culinary writing at the San Francisco Cooking School, and is a judge for the 2022 Publishing Triangle Randy Shilts and Judy Grahn Awards for gay and lesbian nonfiction. He’s married to Perry Lucina, an artist and designer, and lives in Tucson. (Provided by Author)
The Man Who Ate Too Much is one of the finest biographies of recent memory and one of the best culinary biographies around. Consider it required reading for anyone seeking to understand the foundations of modern American cooking. Like the life of James Beard, this biography is big and beautiful, heartbreaking and true. (Norton Website)
This episode is scheduled to air on Friday 02/25/22 at 3:00 AM
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Book Reviews
Book Review: Brownies for Breakfast
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The Well-Seasoned librarian is sponsored by Culinary Historians of Northern California, a Bay Area educational group dedicated to the study of food, drink, and culture in human history. To learn more about this organization and their work, please visit their website at www.chnorcal.org
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Dean Jones is a librarian, cookbook reviewer, and writer. Originally from San Diego and having lived his teen years in the Pacific Northwest, Dean has lived for over 28 years in the wonderful but barely affordable San Francisco Bay Area. Dean has graduated with an MLIS from the University of North Texas and has a BA in Liberal Studies from JFK University in the Bay Area. Dean is the Library Director for Hurwich Library in the San Francisco Bay Area. We can see Dean at Book Festivals, and Library field trips with the BayNet Libraries Group, of which he the President. We can also see him haunting farmers’ markets, bookstores, and local restaurants. Dean lives in the SF Bay Area with his lovely wife, six kids, and many books. Dean writes for “One Table One World,” “The Cookbook for All,” “An Idea,” and “Authors what are you reading.” Contact Dean at wellseasonedlibrarian@gmail.com (Photo by Brian Edwards 2017)